Taylor Swift sat down with “Variety” to discuss her upcoming Netflix documentary “Miss Americana,” debuting January 31st, and during the interview opened up about her mother Andrea’s health struggles, revealing that she is battling a brain tumor.

“Everyone loves their mom; everyone’s got an important mom, but for me, she’s really the guiding force,” Taylor says. “Almost every decision I make, I talk to her about it first. So obviously it was a really big deal to ever speak about her illness.”

Taylor shares that the latest health crisis was discovered while her mother was battling breast cancer. “She was going through chemo, and that’s a hard enough thing for a person to go through,” she says. “While she was going through treatment, they found a brain tumor… So it’s just been a really hard time for us as a family.”

  • Taylor’s mom’s illness directly affected the way Taylor decided to tour behind “Lover,” only playing select festival dates, as well as a handful of her own curated festivals. “That’s the reason. I mean, we don’t know what is going to happen. We don’t know what treatment we’re going to choose,” she shares. “It just was the decision to make at the time, for right now, for what’s going on.”
  • Regardless of why she decided to tour that way, Taylor is excited for the shows. “I wanted to be able to perform in places that I hadn’t performed in as much, and to do things I hadn’t done before, like Glastonbury,” she adds. “But I also wanted to be able to work as much as I can handle right now, with everything that’s going on at home. And I wanted to figure out a way that I could do both those things.”

Among the other revelations from the article:

  • Despite the horrible reviews, Taylor doesn’t regret appearing in “Cats.” “I had a really great time working on that weird-a** movie,” she insists. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience.”
  • “Miss Americana” focuses on Taylor’s decision to become more vocal about politics and certain issues, and one scene shows how “terrified” her father was when she decided to speak out against Tennessee’s Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who she sees as anti-feminist and anti-LGTBQ. Tay shares, “My dad is terrified of threats against my safety and my life, and he has to see how many stalkers we deal with on a daily basis, and know that this is his kid. It’s where he comes from.”
  • Taylor does regret not speaking up sooner, specifically before the 2016 election. “I can’t change that. … I need to be on the right side of history,” she tells her dad in the documentary. As for her decision to go public against Blackburn, Taylor says, “This was a situation where, from a humanity perspective, and from what my moral compass was telling me I needed to do, I knew I was right, and I really didn’t care about repercussions.”
  • Finally, fans will get to hear a brand new song in “Miss Americana,” “Only the Young.” “I wrote it after the midterm elections, when there were so many young people who rallied for their candidate…,” Swift shares. “It was hard to see so many people feel like they had canvassed and done everything and tried so hard. I saw a lot of young people’s hopes dashed. And I found that to be particularly tragic.” Taylor says she has no plans to release the tune as a single, although it will be available for streaming and download.  She notes, “I just see it as a song that goes with this film.”

Source: Variety